Sword of Shame

by The Medieval Murderers

‘They say Lazzari was part of the scam, Zuliani, and that you silenced him when the truth came out. Just to save your own skin.’ There was a rustling in the seat behind me, as if Alimpato was eager to put a very great distance between himself and me. And I couldn’t blame him. But first, he had a final warning. ‘It matters little now what has gone before. All is lost, and the Signori are on your trail. I suggest you get out while you still can. I know I am.’

  So the flim-flam was blown apart like a powder barrel in the Arsenal shipyard, and the Signori di Notte, or ‘Gentlemen of the Night’, were hunting in broad daylight. I twisted round in my pew, but all I saw was the back of the cloaked shape of Alimpato disappearing down the central aisle, taking his own advice. I crossed myself in one last effort to get God on my side, and dashed out of the church into the bright sunlight of a clear Venetian afternoon. Hesitating for a moment in the church’s doorway, I considered my options.

  My best hope of escape lay towards the marshy wastes to the north of the island republic. But I was trapped on the southern side of the Grand Canal, at the bottom of the reversed S-shaped loop of that wide, watery thoroughfare. The only foot crossing was the Rialto pontoon bridge in the middle of the loop. But that was too far away, and too risky to cross–the Signori di Notte police force would have men posted on it. Fortunately, there were also many random points at which the canal could be crossed. On ferry-boats.

  I ran along the quay to the tip of the southern island, the Punta della Dogana. But even as I did so, I heard a cry from behind me.

  ‘Nicolo Zuliani–the game’s up.’

  Glancing over my shoulder, I saw that the man who had called out was dark-browed, solemn and heavily bearded. It was Lorenzo Gradenigo. I knew him from childhood, and he had been a bully then. He strode towards me, as I searched for a way out. Almost upon me, he pointed at my dishevelled mantle with a stubby finger.

  ‘Look, the blood stain is still on you. Murderer.’

  I remembered my drunken antics with the Dolfin sword, and how I had nicked myself. But this was not the time to protest that it was an old stain, and my own blood besides. I stuck my fist hard in Gradenigo’s face, and drew some fresh blood with which to stain my clothes. As he reeled back, clutching his squashed features, I dodged round him. Not far ahead, I saw the drab, dark uniforms of half a dozen Signori coming in pursuit, swords drawn and flashing in the sunlight.

  ‘The game’s not over yet,’ I muttered through gritted teeth, as I ran down the quay. There was no time to negotiate with any of the waiting boatmen. Their keen sense of a bargain would have ensured several minutes of debate before a price for crossing the canal could have been agreed on. And those were minutes I could not now spare. I was facing the imminent likelihood of capture and incarceration in the doge’s prison, from where I was unlikely ever to emerge. Except in a coffin.

  Suddenly, I saw a large, flat barge being expertly steered out of the mouth of the Giudecca canal to my right.

  ‘Just in time, my friend.’

  I put on a spurt as the boat wallowed past the end of the wooden quay along which I and my pursuers were running. Its prow pointed across the Bacino di San Marco towards the landing in front of the Doge’s Palace itself. Without pausing for thought, I sprinted to the end of the quay, and launched myself into space with a yell. ‘I hope you’re carrying something soft.’

  I sailed through the air, and landed right in front of the startled boatman. It was indeed a soft landing. The barge was a rubbish carrier filled with the rotting remains of the leavings of rich men’s tables. And there were many rich men in Venice. I was sitting up to my waist in stinking vegetables and rotting fish bones.

  Despite my predicament, I laughed uproariously at the frustration of my pursuers, who stood shaking their fists on the quayside. But even as I watched, Gradenigo split his crew into two groups. Some ran off along the quay in a desperate but doomed attempt to cut me off on foot, while the rest hurried down the steps to the water’s edge to hire a boat. I knew they would find someone ready to ferry them–every Venetian from the highest to the lowest has his price. Even for the hated Signori di Notte. But I had a start on them, and that was all I needed.

  ‘What’s to stop me just paddling in circles till they catch us up, maestro?’

  The oarsman’s tone was wheedling and cunning, and the barge wallowed ominously. I saw that the boat containing my pursuers was already cutting through the waters of the basin at each stroke of the single oar, and sighed histrionically. I pulled my purse from my waist, and jingled the contents.

  ‘Name your price.’

  The oarsman grinned, revealing a mouth devoid of anything but rotting stubs of teeth. I could smell his breath even above the stench of the offal on which I sprawled.

  ‘You must be desperate, not to bargain. Give me the lot.’

  He held his hand out for my purse. Hesitating only for a moment, I dropped it into the grasping fist. In a flash it was stowed safely in the folds of the man’s filthy rags, and the refuse collector returned to plying his own oar with a will. As the landing at San Marco approached, I got ready to leap off, and disappear right under the doge’s nose into the narrow alleys beyond the Palace. Not least because my rescuer would be outraged to discover, when he opened the strings of my purse, that he had been caught out like Malamocco had by a few pennies and several rusty nail heads. After all, I had wagered all my money on the election.

  The escape provided me with a moment of elation, and I dared to return briefly to my rooms in order to retrieve the sword. Especially as it looked as though I would need it now. I reckoned I could find some respite by lying low in my uncle’s palazzo for a while. Uncle Matteo was on the Dalmatian coast on business, so I would have the place to myself. The modest house backed on to the family church of San Zulian, and was as safe a place as I could find for the time being. But even as I drew breath, I knew I would have to go eventually. All the Zuliani family properties would be searched sooner or later. I began to wonder if exile wasn’t so bad an option, after all. The alternative–torture, and death in the doge’s dungeon–was unthinkable. The only problem was having to give up hopes of Caterina. It was for that reason alone that I went against my own better judgement.

  I decided on trying to prove my innocence–at least of the murder of Domenico Lazzari. I thought that maybe, if I could achieve that, I could talk myself out of the accusation of vote-rigging. It was a long shot, but I had gambled on longer odds at dice and won. Though usually I gave blind chance a little helping hand in such circumstances. Now, as I couldn’t manufacture my own evidence, I would have to rely on uncovering the plain truth, uneasy as I found such a concept. Especially as my first action was to try and contact the thief Alimpato again. Despite my predicament, I laughed at the thought of my acting like a public prosecutor from the Council of Forty-one. The only problem was that I would have to operate in secret, and largely at night if I was not to get arrested myself, and brought before the Quarantia.

  Fortunately, Venice is a doubly convoluted labyrinth, well designed for skulduggery and sneaking around in the dark. There is first the maze of streets, or calle, some of which cut under buildings. And interwoven with that is a second maze of canals, or rio. At various points you can step across from one to the other, bewildering anyone who is trying to follow you, especially if they are strangers, or only know their own district. I am perforce familiar with the whole of Venice and its underworld. Card-sharping often required hasty exits and obfuscated escape routes.

  Like many houses in Venice, my uncle’s has a back door that opened into an alley barely as wide as a body. You never know when you might need to avoid your debtors. Now, even if the front of the house and the water entrance were under observation, no one would see me come and go. After dark, I slipped through this door, and down the narrow alley which also backed on to the church of San Zulian. With my sword belted to my waist, the passage was a tight fit. But it soon gave out on to a wider calle that ran down parallel to the Mercer
ia towards a tiny rio. On the water at this junction bobbed a small flat boat with its pole jammed in the Venetian mud. It was my uncle’s boat. I jumped into it, and used the pole to manoeuvre it northwards towards a T-junction. There I turned east, and poled to an elbow where I followed the southern arm of the rio. As the boat snaked between the buildings on either side, the water plashed against their walls. But no one was made aware of my presence, as all the houses and workshops looked the other way out to the street. On the rio side, they were blind. I poled cautiously along, until I came across a building to my right which was heavily fortified. I was at the back of the Doge’s Palace, and incorporated in its lowest levels were the prison cells. My expectation was to find Malamocco languishing in one of these.

  Despite his avowed intention to go to ground, Alimpato had not been too difficult to find. Especially when he knew I wanted to find out the location of the boy. It appeared Malamocco was still being held in the Doge’s Palace, while it was decided if a swift or a slow death was warranted in his case. I was grateful that the doge was still in a quandary over such a matter. It gave me time to effect a rescue. Alimpato suggested I was mad, when I had proposed it.

  ‘I knew you were a gambler. But not one to go against such long odds, Nick.’

  Apart from Cat, Alimpato was the only person who used the English version of my name. The fact that previously only my mother had been the one to use it, and then only privately beyond my father’s earshot, tells you how precious it is to me. She was born in Salisbury in England, and said she never regretted marrying my father, despite the pain and suffering he caused her. Still, she is free of all that now, God rest her soul. I smiled sadly, and patted Alimpato on his skinny back.

  ‘Such long odds, and such a little reward.’ I sketched Malamocco’s height with my hand, barely raising my palm above my waist. ‘Such a small package, and yet such a big appetite.’

  Alimpato laughed, knowing that I could do nothing else but take the risk. It was my fault that the boy’s short life would soon be ended otherwise. He would have expected nothing less of me. At least he gave me a fighting chance with a sort of plan.

  ‘I can speak to the gaoler–he is my cousin’s brother by marriage–and he will arrange for the boy to be in one of the rio-side cells. They are below water level, and are damp, stinking and full of rats, so are usually kept for the doge’s worst enemies. But for the boy it can be little worse than where he lived before his imprisonment. After that, it is down to you Nick.’

  Which is why I was now slowly pulling myself and my boat along the stone walls of the doge’s prison, urgently calling into the barred windows that stood barely above water level.

  ‘Malamocco, are you there?’

  At the first two windows, my call only elicited a rustling that may have been rats, or the shifting of the starved body of some long-incarcerated prisoner. At the third window I received a reply.

  ‘Who’s there?’ came the timorous reply. It was a boy’s voice, but one that from fear and hunger no longer sounded like that of the cocky Malamocco I had trained in sleight-of-hand.

  ‘It’s me–the card-sharp. I’m going to get you out.’

  His eager face appeared at the bars, a little paler and a lot gaunter than when I had seen it last. But the gleam in his eyes told me the cockiness was not completely lost. I pushed my boat pole in the mud to secure the little barge in place, and drew my sword. The boy recoiled from the bars in horror.

  ‘Barratieri! What are you going to do? Cut me into little pieces so I can pass through the bars?’

  ‘Don’t be silly, or I will go away again.’

  I pulled on a pair of stout leather gloves and held the sword in both hands by the sharp-edged blade, my right hand close to its tip. I apologized for the misuse I was going to make of such a fine weapon.

  ‘Forgive me, sword-maker, whoever you were, for mistreating your blade so,’

  Then I began to dig at the crumbly stonework round one of the bars. The boat bobbed with my exertions, and because of that the effort proved more awkward and more difficult than I had hoped. But eventually the hole in the stone grew to a shallow groove, and then a deep furrow. Malamocco pushed at the bar, as I pulled, and with a groan that I feared may alert someone, it came free. The gap thus created was big enough for Malamocco to squeeze through. I just gave thanks that he had not put on more weight while eating at my expense. I sheathed the sword, swearing I would have the tip re-sharpened, and helped the boy down into the bottom of the flat barge. Where he lay shivering until we were back at my uncle’s house, and relative safety.

  A few hours later, I was beginning to wish I had not rescued him. Once he had regained his spirits, he had only stopped talking long enough to stuff most of the contents of my uncle’s larder down his throat. Most of what he said was unlikely tales of his own bravado.

  ‘And do you know, Barratieri, I told them nothing. I insisted I did not know anyone called Lazzari, or Zuliani. As indeed I don’t, do I, Barratieri?’

  At this point he either had his tongue firmly in his cheek, or he was still chewing on my uncle’s best smoked ham. I swiped at his tow-head, and he laughed. I knew his incarceration would have been terrifying, and allowed him his little show of braggadocio.

  He babbled on. ‘Any more than you know a boy called Polo, eh? But what I did learn was the name of the man who denounced this Zuliani fellow to the Signori de Notte.’

  My ears pricked up. If I was to start on the hunt for who killed Lazzari, I could best begin with the name of the person who had landed me in the shit. I half-expected the boy to say Pasquale Valier’s name. But he didn’t.

  ‘They thought I couldn’t hear. But once, when I was being questioned, I heard them whispering to each other. They spoke of a man called Sebenico.’

  I could almost have stepped into Sebenico’s silversmithing workshop on the Merceria from my uncle’s front door. But that would have given him the opportunity to see me coming. So that night, I once again slipped out of the back door, and down to the boat moored on the local narrow rio. This time I steered the boat in the opposite direction to the previous night. This took me under the Merceria, and round the rear of some of the workshops and living quarters on that very street, including those of Sebenico. At one point a street crossed the water, near a sottoportego, or archway, running under the buildings. I quietly moored my boat at this subterranean passage, and stepped on to dry land. Above me and to the left side were the workshop and domestic quarters of Sebenico the silversmith. My denouncer. I still wasn’t sure if he himself was Lazzari’s killer. I knew only that Sebenico had been the most displeased with his return on the Syrian colleganza. Which must have been why he did what he did.

  With so much valuable silver on his premises, I knew the doors would be stout and well-barred. But sometimes, the wood that formed the ceiling of a sottoportego was thin and rotten from damp. I climbed on to some barrels that had been discarded in the passage, and put my hand to the wooden beams above my head. Over me would be a corridor, or even a room in Sebenico’s apartments–I had no way of knowing. I listened for a while, but could hear nothing. It was a risk, but one worth taking.

  Once more, I unsheathed my sword, and set it to another task for which it had not been designed. The creator of such a pure sword must now be turning in his grave at my abuse of his blade. I pushed the tip that I had scratched on the doge’s prison window arch in between two planks of wood, just where the length of timber ended, and twisted. I was fearful that the blade would snap with such abuse, but instead the wood creaked and one of the short lengths of timber gave way. Sliding the sword back in its sheath, I heaved upwards, pushing the plank out of the way. Sometimes I act without too much forethought, and this was one of those occasions. Having gained access to Sebenico’s home, I was not too certain as to my next move. I need not have worried.

  No sooner had I pushed away the floorboard, than a startled face, illuminated by a tallow lamp, stared down at me. It was wall-eyed Seben
ico himself, roused by my none-too-quiet breaking and entering. Well, I suppose it wasn’t really entering, because I didn’t get that far. All I did was grab the surprised silversmith by the loose folds of his nightgown, and pull him down head-first into the hole at his feet. Suspended virtually upside-down above my head, he was in no position to resist my swift and brutal interrogation.

  ‘Zuliani!’ he gasped, as his inverted features turned a bright shade of red. ‘I shall call the Signori, if you don’t release me immediately.’

  ‘I think you have done that already once before, Sebenico. As I am already on the run, I have nothing more to fear from that quarter. Squeal as much as you like, I shall be gone before they even know I have been here.’

  I could hear his feet banging on the boards above my head, but my grasp was firm, and his struggles only served to make him more red-faced and dizzy.

  ‘So tell me, good sir, how you came to denounce me, and what you know about the death of Domenico Lazzari. Tell me now, or I might be tempted to draw my sword, and use your head for target practice.’

  His mouth gaped in horror, and saliva dribbled from its corners, as he grappled with the realization I knew what he had done. I could almost see the fervid calculations going on in his head, as he calculated how much he had to divulge. I yanked again on his gown, and he squawked as his shoulders wedged firm in the jagged hole in his floor.

  ‘Ahhh! Let me go. Yes, yes, I denounced you for the murder of Lazzari. But that was not my idea. I merely wanted to find some misdemeanour to land you with. To make things hot for you, after you swindled us over the colleganza. We both did. But then he said we should stick you with a far more serious matter, and said as how you were already up to no good with Lazzari. So the Quarantia would believe it, if you were blamed for his death. He said as how it was likely you were responsible for it anyway, even if it could never be proved. So I would only be helping the truth along. I had heard nothing of Lazzari’s murder before he told me, I swear it.’